Thursday, April 06, 2006

Some Rebuttals to Mearsheimer & Walt's "Israel Lobby"

The manifesto attacking the "Israel Lobby" and its alleged stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East by two prominent academics of the self-styled "realist" school, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, appeared in mid-March of 2006 in two versions: The full 83-page version (with footnotes) was printed as a Working Paper at Harvard entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," and a condensed version (without footnotes) appeared in the London Review of Books (vol. 28, #6 - 23 March 2006) as "The Israel Lobby."

I emphasized that this was a preliminary list--not least because I expected that further critiques of M&W's argument would be appearing, as indeed they did. Among the relatively brief responses already available at that time (i.e., as of April 6, 2006), I think the letter to the LRB by Herf & Markovits was the most substantial single critique. (I would also highlight the Forward editorial, despite the fact that it has a few slips and errors of its own, and the piece by Lee Smith, which is both cogent and hilarious--see here).

Any comprehensive, point-by-point refutation would have to be a long piece, given how many of M&W's assertions are either tendentious, misleading, logically questionable, or simply incorrect. At the time this list was originally posted, the only full-scale refutation I knew of was the one by Alan Dershowitz that appeared on April 5, but I suspected that others were already in the works. When they appeared, I have tried to include them in this list. [Update 4/28/06: The New Republic piece by Benny Morris also belongs in his category, though Morris focuses on just a few key assertions made by M&W.]

Critiques and rebuttals of Mearsheimer & Walt's "Israel Lobby" manifesto tapered off some time ago, but new ones continue to appear occasionally. If anyone knows of other significant pieces that should also be included here, suggestions are welcome. (Let me emphasize that I have included only pieces that make some kind of substantive argument, so mere denunciations are excluded, and I would also exclude any piece that even hints at the possibility of any kind of professional sanctions against Mearsheimer or Walt--though, to be honest, I don't recall seeing any serious critiques that did this.)

[Update 10/29/2007: In August 2007 Mearsheimer & Walt published a book-length version of their manifesto, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The list below now includes critical responses to their book as well as to their original article.]
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Adam Shatz, "Dialogue of the Deaf" | Guardian "Comment is Free" blog - March 24, 2006[Shatz would clearly like to be able to praise M&W's paper. He goes out of his way to compliment their "welcome" contributions and dismiss their critics, and he devotes much of this piece to his own attacks on Israel and the "Israel Lobby"; but in the end he is forced to conclude that M&W's argument is overstated, unconvincing, and misleading. "[T]hey seem so in awe of the lobby's power that they have abandoned their realism for the fantasy that Washington is Israeli-occupied territory."--JW]

Mitchell Plitnick & Chris Toensing, "'The Israel Lobby' in Perspective" | Middle East Report - Summer 2007 (#243)[Plitnick & Toensing are sympathetic to Mearsheimer & Walt, praise them for the "courageous step" they took, and dismiss most of their critics as "hysterical and unfair." However, when it comes to the substantive issues, Plitnick & Toensing's critique of M&W's position is actually quite devastating.]

George Friedman, "The Israel Lobby in US Strategy" | Strategic Forecasting - September 5, 2007[This piece does not explicitly mention Mearsheimer & Walt, but the kinds of arguments it criticizes are recognizably those peddled by M&W.]

Mark LeVine, "No, it's the dog that wags the tail" | Asia Times - September 8, 2007[LeVine's critique of M&W is similar to those of Chomsky and Massad: "Mearsheimer and Walt seem to know little about the Middle East, Israel's role in US foreign policy, and what are core US goals and strategic interests in the region. They argue that this is a case of the "tail wagging the dog" - a small client state and its allies in the US leading the US government to engage in policies that are manifestly against its interests because of undue political power.But this is nonsense. In fact, it is the other way around. The United States has been using Israel to fulfill its policy objectives for decades...."]

Daniel Lazare, "Lobbying Degree Zero" | The Nation - October 22, 2007 [posted October 4, 2007][A strongly critical review by someone who would have liked to see a powerful and effective critique of the Israel Lobby, and who clearly dislikes many of M&W's critics intensely, but who is forced to conclude that the actual book "that Mearsheimer and Walt have written suffers from significant methodological deficiencies, which is a polite way of saying it's a mess. [....] They seem to know little about how American government works, how lobbyists function or how the United States interacts with the world at large. They are blind to history and tone-deaf to ideology. Because they blame America's Middle Eastern rampage on a knot of wily Zionist agents, they seem to think that the US role in the region would turn benign if those agents were removed." Etc.]

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)